-Sunday, July 22, 2001-

9:50 p.m.

We started today by going to church. The building wasn't air conditioned, but it wasn't uncomfortable inside. It reminded me of the church I used to attend and had approximately 50 people in attendance. It's a cute white church with a steeple on top and pretty curtains in the windows.

The pastor's wife greeted people before the service, and she teased Marcia, a tiny old lady sitting in front of us. The pastor's wife told us to keep an eye on her, and Marcia looked at us and got the cutest smile on her face. She had no teeth, a little hooked nose, and her white hair was carefully combed. I don't know how old she was, but she was obviously still enjoying life.

Another interesting person was a round, chubby man and his hair was stuck to his head with sweat. I suppose it was gross, but it was almost fascinating to see a drop of sweat hanging from his earlobe like an earring.

We came home after church, ate some fruit salad and taquitos, then sat in the computer room and talked. Then we went to Portsmouth, where I should have taken notes along the way. (Fortunately, Sam helped me sort out events, names, and places later; otherwise, it would all be a jumbled mess in my head.) I think the coolest thing was getting to walk across the bridge. But first I'll pick Sam's brain a bit. That's why there are now notes all over the margins of this page.

Later

Now that my notes are in order, I'll continue. Sam is wearing his Dr. Seuss "Sam I Am" shirt and is lying on the floor, and Leen is next to me on the couch, looking at model horses online.

We got to Portsmouth and parked in the lot where Sam parks every day when he goes to work. I took a picture of Sam standing below the "Sakura" sign, and then we walked to the bridge where Sam frequently walks on his lunch break.

10:45 p.m.

Sam and Leen just went to bed, but of course I'm still not tired.

The bridge was amazing. We walked over a metal grating where we could see down to the street below us. Darleen doesn't like heights, so she walked across quickly. Sam showed me where to stand so that we could see our shadows below. Because of the metal grating, it looked like we were walking on air. The bridge closes every half hour to allow boats to go through, and the cars back up on both sides. However, pedestrians can walk much closer, and it was neat to see a large chunk of the bridge up in the air. Sam pointed out the naval shipyard across the water.

We went across the rest of the bridge after it lowered, and soon I was standing in Maine. Technically, part of the water beneath the bridge is in Maine, but now I was actually standing on Badgers Island, land that belongs to Maine. I paused to take a picture of a road sign that read, "Badgers Is West." It's an abbreviation for "Badgers Island West," but it certainly didn't look that way to me when I first looked at it. Soon we headed back across the bridge, stopping along the way to look at large stacks of lobster traps. This was another new thing for me to see.

Then we had to eat at Me & Ollie's, partly because of the ungrammatical name. Sam and I ordered turkey sandwiches and they were delicious. The sun-dried tomato mayonnaise was new to me but very tasty. We sat outside under some trees for a while, and Leen fed pretzels to a pigeon and a sparrow.

We then walked down the street, where I saw the group of "unique" people sitting on some steps in front of a church. Sam wrote a forum post about these people with their black clothing, tattoos, and "excessively pierced faces," but now I could see them in real life. Sam was waiting for me to discover the next thing he wanted me to see, and I soon spotted the store called Choozy Shooz.

And then I got to see where Sam works. Leen was worried that we shouldn't go in, but Sam said it was fine. He unlocked a side door off the street, and we went up two half-flights of stairs, then through another door where Sam had 30 seconds to deactivate the alarm. (Of course, I remember the code, but I won't write it down here.)

Sam sits in a nice cubicle with his name on the outside of the half-wall. It was very clean and tidy, especially compared to some of the other cubicles. Sam said he cleaned it up because he knew we'd be visiting, but I have a feeling it's never messy.

On our way out of the office, Sam demonstrated the way he can lean down the stairs, grasp the railings on both sides, then go from the top to the bottom in one smooth motion, without even touching any stairs. Again, it was something I could picture when he described it in text, but now I could actually see him doing it.

We left the building, walked along a smelly pond that is somehow invisibly connected to the ocean (the water level rises and sinks with the tides), and Sam and I thoroughly inspected a cannon from 1918. It was welded securely together, but one small part moved, to our great satisfaction. The cannon had three different plates on it, and we calculated (from numbers on the plates) that it must weigh about a thousand pounds.

We drove to a town called Newington and decided to see "America's Sweethearts." The movie has a lot of big names in it (Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Billy Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones, etc), but it wasn't as good as I was hoping. I don't think the characters had enough real character to them. However, it wasn't a bad movie, and I didn't consider it a complete waste of time and money.

I think I'm caught up from my notes now. We got home, Sam and Leen did the exciting thing known as taking out the trash, and we hung out downstairs for a while. I should probably go to bed now, because I hate sleeping in.